Boeing expects Dreamliner back in air 'within weeks'

A Boeing executive said the company's has come up with a permanent fix for 787 battery troubles.

Officials from Chicago-based Boeing Co. said Friday its 787 Dreamliner airplanes, grounded by regulators in January, could be flying again "in weeks, not months."

Despite failing to find a root cause for overheated batteries on two separate 787s that led to their grounding, the company has come up with a mulit-faceted solution that should prevent other incidents and make it impossible for a fire to start with the lithium-ion batteries, Boeing executives said in separate media briefings in Japan and United States on Friday.

Testing to certify the changes involves mostly laboratory tests and a single flight test, because the batteries in question have little to do with operations while the plane is flying, said Ron Hinderberger, vice president of 787-8 Engineering at Boeing.

He said testing has already started and could be completed in a week or two.

Boeing officials said they have no control over how quickly the Federal Aviation Administration recertifies 787s for flight. But the FAA has been very involved in approving the tests, and Boeing is experienced with the pace of the certification process from changes on other airplanes through the years.

"If we look at the normal process and the way in which we work with the FAA, and we look at the testing that's ahead of us, it is reasonable to expect we could be back up and going in weeks, not months," the 787's chief engineer, Mike Sinnett, said at a briefing in Tokyo. He said any problems during the testing would likely add delays of days, not weeks.

However, Japanese regulators warned on Friday the timetable was impossible to predict, and industry sources questioned Boeing's claim of a relatively quick resumption of 787 flights, noting that U.S. regulators had suggested there will be a lengthy testing schedule for the refitted plane.

The Civil Aviation Bureau, the FAA's counterpart in Japan, dismissed Sinnett's prediction, saying it was too early to predict when 787 operations could resume, since investigations by regulators in the U.S. and Japan are still in progress.

Shigeru Takano, the air transport safety director at the CAB, which will assess and approve Boeing's proposed fix, said Sinnett's comment on the battery probe was "inappropriate."

"At this time we are not yet in a position to say when flights will restart," Takano said.

Dreamliner groundings have little impact in the United States. Chicago-based United Airlines is the only U.S. airline to have 787s. It has six in a fleet of about 700 planes.

Boeing officials on Friday would not comment on how much compensation the company would have to pay airlines stemming from 787 groundings.

Boeing provided details Friday on how it will encase the redesigned power pack in a steel box, pack it with different insulation, heat-resistant material and spacers, drainage holes to remove moisture and to vent any gases from overheating directly to the atmosphere outside the aircraft.

The fortified power pack can withstand 80 possible malfunctions covering all the potential failure scenarios that Boeing engineers could envisage, Sinnett said. "I would gladly have my family, my wife and my children, fly on this airplane," he said.

The company has expended more than 200,000 hours of engineering design and analysis to find out what happened, Sinnett said.

Boeing still faces U.S. public hearings in April on the safety of its lithium-ion batteries.

The National Transportation Safety Board in investigating the original process used to certify the battery, suggesting that it will recommend changes in that process.

And FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said on Tuesday that the agency "won't allow the plane to return to service unless we're satisfied that the new design ensures the safety of the aircraft and its passengers."

Regulators grounded all 50 of the carbon-composite Dreamliners worldwide Jan. 16 after a battery produced flames on a Japan Airlines Co. 787 jet at Boston's Logan airport and a battery melted on an All Nippon Airways Co. flight in Japan.